Iceland is overburdened by beauty. My sister and I spent six days on the island, and its vastness, its perilousness, and barrenness haunt me. Also haunting me: the number of times my phone said “signal lost” as we drove a rented hybrid with questionable gas mileage through mountain vistas and along the edge of the sea.

As we strolled the shores of lakes the color of mist-strewn skies, my thoughts rejoined on two themes: the longing for Northernness that C. S. Lewis wrote of so poignantly in Surprised by Joy and the feeling of being a foreigner in a foreign land.

I wasn’t searching for God on that poetic island, but I found him.